Building bridges between music, web development, and social media.

Livefyre

Lyric websites have been a staple of music-related search results since the start of the millenium, but the format of presenting lyrics on many of these sites has remained mainly the same since their inception: plain text with no supplementary information or interactivity. Perhaps the most notable innovator in the genre is Genius — formerly known as Rap Genius, the site’s sidebar annotations now extend to multiple genres and even outside the music sphere to news and entertainment, and infrastructure to help “annotate any page on the Internet” is currently in beta. Google recently began showing lyrics in their search result pages as part of their Knowledge Graph, but beyond requiring a click through to the song available for purchase in their Google Play store for access to the full lyrics, their method of displaying lyrics is no more advanced. Even despite sidebar-comment approaches similar to Genius in other industries, including notes on content platform Medium and annotations on Quartz articles, most lyrics-dedicated sites have been stagnant and unimaginative.

As the largest part of a series of updates to multiple digital platforms to help promote the band’s independently-released sophomore album, The Bridge, I redesigned the WordPress website for Graffiti6’s official website. The site is responsive for both tablet and mobile displays and focuses on Graffiti6’s discography, with custom post types used to build a discography of music releases and a lyrics section. The two sections are connected to link each song on a release to its lyrics, and in order to provide interactivity, I used Livefyre’s Sidenotes plugin to allow fans to share and comment on their favorite lyrics. (Read more on my implementation of Livefyre Sidenotes here.)